Cheerful Abundance

a field notebook of suburban life

After several failed contracts, a bank that was willing to write a pre-authorization for a mortgage but not actually give the buyer a mortgage, and a million showings, I am thrilled to be able to say that our old apartment sold yesterday. Which means I never, ever have to sit through another Board meeting again and listen to owners (and Board members!) complain loudly about how large the assessments are, and then demand the board take on more and more expense, and cover more and more services.

Yeah, I’ll get right on that, because as we all know, the best way to lower expenses is to agree to pay for more services. That is some logic, right there. That is some MATH.

The funnest (and funniest) part of this whole sale is watching the buyer post about her side of the transaction on Facebook. Her love of our place let me be bolder in our counter offers, and now I am watching her talk about what she has to remodel before she moves in, which is a little insulting, and how she wants to paint it all taupe, which makes me cringe, because I would rather saw off a finger than paint a wall beige. But she owns it now, and even though I was dying to get it sold, watching her be so enthusiastic about the place, and reading her friends’ comments about how large it is, what a classic apartment it is, how they don’t make them like that anymore, is making me forget all the reasons we had to move, and get a little wistful. I brought my babies home from Ethiopia to this apartment, and my husband brought me home to it as his childe bride [ed. note: not really].

Then I remembered that one of our neighbours turned arsonist and set us ablaze there, and I stop being so nostalgic, and start thanking God that we live in a single family home now. Fini.

I love the title of this blog post, because it makes it sound like I am at a lakehouse, dreaming, instead of sitting in front a computer all day, surreptitiously visiting web sites that list lakefront properties and summer houses, and wishing that a giant box of money would accidentally fall out of the sky and hit me. I can’t stop haunting this gateway drug of a cottage website, looking at properties in other states that are so, so cheap, and surely those lakes are pristine and lovely and dear Lord why doesn’t someone just buy me a cottage already because that Vera Bradley luggage in the hall closet needs a destination point, and I need a place to show off my lovely summer pedicure.

Surely one of you would like to buy me this lovely Lake Michigan cottage, right? I would let you come visit for a weekend, cook you some dinner, serve you the premium liquor. Isn’t that a deal you want to take?

Look here – if you bought this for me, you and I could be sitting here, right now, having a drink together. Let’s make it happen, people!

I don’t want to sound like I am putting words in the Lord’s mouth here, but I am pretty sure that he wants the next step in my real estate game to be the purchase of the Lake Geneva cottage built for the heiress to a major Wisconsin brewing fortune.Do you see how flexible I am? That house, above, is on Lake Michigan, and this one is several states away.

Isn’t this exactly what your summer house is supposed to look like? Can’t you see us day drinking and playing croquet here?

The longer I web surf for cottages, the more snobby and demanding I get. “Oh, this one is cute and all, but it is lake access, not lakefront. Surely I can’t be expected to walk across the street to get to a beach? I would DIE,” and, “Oh, that cottage is cute, but that lake it is on is too small.” You know, the kind of judgy-ness appropriate from someone who does not have the ability to buy one grain of sand in a rat-poop filled city playground sandbox, much less a home on the water.

But doesn’t summer make you dream of this? Of packing up the car and running away from the city every weekend? Of inner tubing, and fishing, and the smell of damp towels and wet dog and cold gin?

So, about two months ago, I posted about how I had this big real-life project going on that I was avoiding like crazy. Because I was avoiding it, I wasn’t really getting anything else done, either – this stupid big project is like a clog in my productivity drain, and if I don’t clear it away, my to-do list is just going to keep stacking up. So I was all, Time to EAT MY FROG. I ordered the book from the library, excited to follow all of its instructions and stop being a stupid procrastinator, and when it came in, I picked it up, and …. didn’t read it. Not only haven’t I eaten my damned frog yet, I haven’t even finished the book yet, which was due back yesterday, so now, yes, gentle reader, I am paying overdue fees on a book about conquering procrastination. Because I am a genius.

Do you ever just feel stuck? I felt so stuck in the past month, blocked by a work project I am too afraid to start, mired in a real estate sale from hell, and living in our new house, which is only half set up, despite moving in 10 months ago. Is there anything more depressing than going to bed in a room surrounded by baskets of clean laundry that has no place to be put away to, and a pile of boxes, still unpacked, in the corner, and dressers that you can’t hardly dust because you keep piling all the stuff you need to keep track of on top of them? Depressing. Circumstances, depressing, surroundings, depressing.

But not as depressing as the sale of our old house. Or, more accurately, the former-sale of our former house, because, after making us all wait two long months, the buyer’s bank, the same bank that issued their preapproval letter, said, “No. No mortgage for you! And no reason why, either.” This is why we can’t have nice things, America. Because even though the amount was low, the buyer’s credit exemplary, and the apartment being perfection, the bank decided that they don’t like condo mortgages, and off they went. And back on the market we went, again, just yesterday.

So, poor, First World Problems Me. But even while I can recognize how lucky I truly am, it doesn’t change the fact that the sale falling through, and the highs and lows that got us to the fall, coupled with issues at work, and the clutter of our new place, poorly set up, started to weigh on me, to the extent that the only logical thing to do felt like maybe just curling up in a ball in the middle of my bed and not moving, for oh, say, a few months. A season of motionlessness, just letting the time pass uncounted over me while I thought about nothing.

But you know, two kids, can’t indulge in that, have to find a way to suck it up, all British stiff-upper-lip like, so instead, to start taking away the imaginary weight holding me down on the bed, my husband and I did a huge, master to-do list of everything that we need to do this summer, and every thing that needed to be done in this house to get it to ‘finished’. Or rather, ‘finished, except those two storage rooms in the basement that we can close the doors to and worry about later’. The list is two pages long, and we just put our heads down and ploughed through it, hanging shelves, unpacking a few of the last boxes hanging around the living room, sorting books, and cleaning. Because this is what I know about situational depression: it feeds off of chaos, mess, and dirt. I can’t start feeling better until the exterior of my life looks better, and now it does. I feel like crap, but I feel like crap while hiding under a pretty new duvet cover, in a very clean bedroom, and that helps.

Plus, we made a LIST, and how sexy is that, making a list, and checking things off.

So that lifted the weight of the messy house off of me, but I was still trapped under the ‘we need to sell this condo last month’ weight, which I am fixing online by alternating between looking up dream properties to buy in coastal towns, preferably waterfront, and watching videos on YouTube where women let their men give them a makeover. “It’s a process, baby,” and really, truer words never spoken, amirite?

I kind of love Jenna Marbles’ videos. I like pretty girls who laugh at themselves.

I don’t have a nice, tidy ending for this shamble of a ramble. I still didn’t eat my frog, I still feel a little overwhelmed into paralysis, but I am working on moving through it, kicking until I can find the sandbar under my feet, trying not to sink too deep.

Faithful readers know that I bought a house last summer, before I put my old place on the market, because I love paying property taxes so much that I wanted to do it at two addresses at the same time. And because everybody knows that buying a new place before selling your old place is just good business sense (ha!) And then it took us forever to move out fully, because we are idiots, and then it took longer and longer to clean it up and get it ready to be on the market because we just did not want to go back there. We are moving forward kind of people. Also, it is very disheartening to fix the flaws you lived with just fine because you were too lazy to fix them, just because apparently buyers will be aghast at the horror of those same flaws and run screaming from them.

But we finally got it ready, and hooked up with a realtor, who walked through the place, pointed out everything that was wrong with it and unfixable, and complained about the lack of parking. He was quick to tell us he didn’t like the size of the kitchen, the street parking situation, or the lack of another bathroom. It was a little surreal, because he couldn’t find anything to like about the property, but was quick to tell us what would make it hard to sell. Dude, you are a salesman. This is your job. No property is perfect, and it is your job to make the buyers see the positives, and help them overcome any negatives. Is this a normal practice for realtors, to point out the flaws you can’t fix? Needless to say, we didn’t hire him. The giant rooms, sweeping expanse of windows, and 12 foot ceilings? He couldn’t see it.

But then … ugh. We were back at square one. After we regrouped from our meeting with Captain Negativity, we met with another realtor, one who came in and commented on everything right with the place, and who gave us a very doable list of stuff she wanted us to fix (that was actually fixable!) before we listed. Paint touch ups, some cleaning, adding in a little furniture. Doable stuff. Stuff we expected to do. None of Captain Negative’s ‘Can you put in a second bathroom’ nonsense. We were so thrilled that we signed with her and off we puttered, cleaning up the baseboards, weeding the front garden, and then …. on the MLS we went.

Real estate right now is crazy, people. Crazy! We fielded several ‘almost offers’, but the first one on paper was full-ask, with a pre-approved mortgage. I died a little. 4 days from listing to signed offer.

But nothing goes smoothly, does it? Turns out, the mortgage business, and banking in general, has forgotten how this whole ‘buying a house’ thing works. Pre-approval means nothing. Sure, our buyers were pre-approved, but now they might not be able to actually get a mortgage from the company that approved them to get the mortgage. Does that make sense to you? No? Me, either. They love the place, we would love to sell it to them, and somehow, it is becoming increasingly evident that that can’t happen. And I am sad, not just because I obviously would like to sell it and have that be one thing off my massive to-do list, but also because this apartment is just such a heavenly place to live, and I love the idea of it going to someone who feels the same way about it. We kept the windows wide open 9 months of the year, while we lived here, and it felt like living in a giant tree-house, an oasis in the middle of a big city. And I think the people that made the offer felt it, too – the peacefulness of the space. So now we are all praying to the mortgage Gods that it works out, because otherwise, we have to cancel the contract and start again.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But these jeans were only a month old!

I told myself, when I started blogging again, that I wouldn’t talk about work (boring), or current events (everyone has an opinion; no need to share them). But this week is kicking my ass, and making me want to curl up into a little ball in the middle of my bed and just not move for a while. Like, a few years worth of ‘while’, lying completely still and motionless. And without thoughts. That’s normal, right?

Speaking of normal, this past Sunday was the deadline for kindergarten applications, which means I am spending this week haunting our mailbox for our official letter. We are hoping the kids’ got into a selective enrollment school, whose PTA website I have scoured thoroughly, and whose denizens I have judged to be the kind of people who drink top shelf liquor for no reason and really care about education (good), but might be helicopter parents who are overly invested in their kids’ experiences in life (bad). PTA at this school could be a full time job and/or a byzantine political nightmare, but the academic and social resources offered there are beyond anything in the regular school system.

But… but. Always a but. We started the kids in baseball this week, and it turns out everyone on their team either is currently, or slated to attend, our neighbourhood elementary school, and I met some of the moms and really liked them. You know when people are just nice, in that decent sort of way that makes you feel happy for just having met them? That kind of nice. The chill kind of people that make PTA kind of a fun thing to volunteer for. And those would be our parent friends if we stuck with the neighbourhood school. So now I don’t know what we want, or what our options are, and somewhere, on its way to me, is a letter that tells me that all the ridiculous of the kindergarten process is officially over, and we have been sorted, Hogwarts-style, into an academic academy for the next 6 years.

My anxiety level about this school thing is off the charts, in part because, with a six weeks left in the school year, we are starting to feel pretty pushed out of our old school. Lots of parents who all seem to have accidentally lost our contact information when they realized we moved to a new town, albeit one just scant blocks away from school property. The school officials know we aren’t coming back, but they keep asking! It is a delicate dance, these conversations. I don’t want to tell them why we aren’t coming back, because my kids are still there, and I want them to be coddled and adored. And the school wants us back, but I suspect only for our tuition money. We went to a school event this past week, where I practiced what might be my greatest social skill (eavesdropping), and where I picked up some huge gossip about why the principal is leaving, and how the PTA has become a house divided, as two large Irish families fight for dominance and control over it. That might be it’s own entry in the next few days, the massive politicking and strategery going on to wrest control and enact change in …. oh, yes. A small parochial elementary school with less than 100 students. Oh, power. Oh, glory!

IN other, stress-related news, our old house officially went on the market this week, and so far, I am obsessively checking RedFin, to see how many strangers have favourited it. So far? Seven! We are practically giving it away, and hopefully someone walks in, feels the fabulous karma we left behind, and buys it immediately. When our realtor sent us the photos, we feel in love with it. Amazing what a wide angle lens and a lot of cleaning up can do to make a place look way, way better than it ever did when you lived in it.

That is our week, in a nutshell. Baseball, school letters, real estate. A giant basket of first-world problems that make me ashamed of how low some of my late night hopes are aimed.

As a generally non-craft-doing person, I am just tickled with myself over these.

Even though they cost us a fortune to make, I am so thrilled with how our valentines turned out! I am calling this a win – not only were the valentines inventive and sweet, and did not involve distributing candy, but because the kids will be in a new school next year for Kindergarten, we can replicate them next year as well, for the cost of a few packs of dollar store foil pencils. And they were definitely a hit among the preschool set. And my kids loved giving them out. I am so, so grateful to Pauline Grayson, the genius behind Sweet Muffin Suite, who came up with these and was generous enough to share the idea and the PDF with her readers. I love generous, creative people! We ended up tinkering with the original design, by adding in a digital signature each child wrote herself (because there was no way at their age they could sign as many as we had to give out), and we tweaked the colours, because I am a fussy baby who can’t be near yellow or I break out in a rash, and also, I like oceany colours, and pinks.Why yes, I am hard to live with – but what prompted you to ask?

With the self-healing cutting mats and good X-acto knives, these were a snap to finish. We did 60 in less than an hour, and that included the ridiculous amount of time I spent matching the pencil ‘shaft’ to the arrow colour. Pink and gold was pretty hot looking, and Martha-approved. I can’t even get over myself and the amount of self-backpatting I am doing over these, but when Pinterest makes me think other women, better mothers, do this stuff every day with their kids, I can feel myself going down the road of mental comparisons, and that is a race this lady is never going to win.

Are you sick of reading about my Great Valentine Crafting Adventures? Never fear, I only do it to spare you the pain we call Still Owning Our Old Home While Living In Our New Home. Our old home that isn’t on the market yet, and it has been 6 months. Our old home that sucks the money out of my bank account so fast that it leaves me breathless. Our old home that just driving near makes me start hyperventilating with money stress. When we drive past the street that was our old turn-off to the old neighbourhood, the kids always start chanting, “no, no, NOOOOO” in unison in the back seat. None of us want to go back there! Next week we meet with a realtor and get this show started, and this morning, I ordered a St. Joseph from Amazon to bury near the ‘for sale’ sign, because it can’t hurt, right?

So, yes, seriously, we are venturing into the Star Wars definition of ‘trilogy’ here, with this real estate series, but … blogging every day! Lots of real estate feels. It feels right.

After we saw the disastrous house by the lake, the one my realtor calls ‘the pee house’, we saw lots of other houses. We saw a house that smelled so strongly of smoke that I had to exit the house and wait for my husband on the porch. When I mentioned the weird ombre paint job to the realtor, she pointed out that it wasn’t ombre at all – the walls were white at the bottom, brown on the top, with nicotine stains. As smoke had drifted up the wall, it had left marks that, over time and millions of cigarettes, had left a sort of faux paint effect. This was a house that had kids in it, a baby, and a very depressed bunny in the basement, a bunny I had to restrain my husband from liberating under his jacket.

We saw houses marketed by liars (fourth ‘bedroom’ is the walk in closet off the master, fourth ‘bedroom’ is the pull out couch in the basement rumpus room, second bathroom is the toilet jammed next to the washer in the laundry room, ‘eat-in kitchen’ is any kitchen you can wedge a chair and bistro table into, etc), and we saw a lot of real estate collapse detritus. I would love to be a realtor, except for the selling part – all the going into people’s homes, seeing how they live. Fascinating. I went through 3 bottles of Purell. The houses we saw were all so dirty, and often dirty with people still living in them.

During our entire 3 month house hunt, I only saw one staged, clean home. One. Also, it was perfect in every way in terms of staging. Immaculate, smelled like lemons, obviously cleared of personal items, nothing on the kitchen counters. It was too small and just not laid out well for our needs, but I wanted to leave those people a note, telling them how much we appreciated their beautiful home. I said a little prayer for them. “Quick sale. Over asking. Please.”

And then a beauty of a fixer-upper popped up on the MLS.

Weird, how normal it looks in this picture.

Dream town, dream location, right next to a park, the playscape maybe 20 yards from the driveway. 5 bedrooms, home office, garage, a deck out back, on a very private cul-de-sac street with only 2 other neighbours. Front and back staircases, a personal dream of mine. A classic colonial, with a big front porch. Oh, how we dreamed over it. While we waited for our realtor to set it up, I drove by it, saw workmen pulling junk out of the garage, and finagled my way into seeing it with the foreman. Empty. Dirty. But such a diamond in the rough, with the right kind of work.

You know how you can fall dreamy in love with someone even though your practical brain is making reasonable lists for you of why this guy is wrong for you on every level? That is what this house was like, for me. For example, it had been an illegal two-flat, and the flippers who bought it at a foreclosure auction had torn the kitchen out of the upstairs to make it a legal house again. But the front stairs had been removed when the upstairs was converted to an apartment, which made the first floor kind of awkward. Easy fix, right? The flippers just drilled a giant hole in the middle of the living room ceiling and installed a beige metal circular staircase.

Make sure you instal it right in front of the picture window, for maximum stupidness. These house flippers did.

A hundred warning signs popped up, telling us not to buy this house. a hundred warning signs, and a hundred thousand cockroaches. But I couldn’t see them, because I was so busy remaking this house in my head into my Ultimate Dream Home. After we toured it, we visited the playscape next to it in the park, and met our potential new neighbours, who welcomed us with open arms, invited us to be part of their neighbourhood association, told us about outdoor movie nights, and picnics, and barbeques they had, and … oh, suburban people, you have no idea. No idea! To go from living in a place where nobody talks to anyone else, ever, to the welcoming arms of real neighbours, a real neighbourhood. I was in love with these people.

So, we made an offer, then we danced with the seller for a bit, and then …. the heavens parted, the angels sang …. they accepted our offer.

The picture doesn’t do it justice, how big this house is. How spacious. How much it is the opposite of living in an apartment with two kids and no lawn. To celebrate our good fortune, we packed the kids in the car and drove over to the house. We parked in the driveway (our driveway, soon!) and headed back over to the playscape to let the kids romp around while we toasted our good fortune with coffees. While we were there, though, we watched the vacant lot that sits 2 houses up from our soon-to-be new home. Cars started stopping, and passengers disembarking. Coolers arrived. Cigarettes lit. Music blaring out of the car windows. It was a party. And we looked at each other, a little stunned. Is this how it is done, in the ‘burbs? People drive around until they find a vacant, but immaculately mowed lot, then party down?

Eventually, the police arrived, and as they did, the party drifted into the park, and the playscape, where grown men smoked cigarettes and dropped the f-bomb in front of my kids, while we walked back to our car. Was this the norm, next to the house our offer had just been accepted on? What had just happened, exactly? Suddenly, we were second-guessing the whole thing. But there was earnest money in, and we were committed.

And then came the home inspection. An inspection that took 4+ hours. At one point, the inspector took a break and told us he wished he could bring his trainees to see this house, because it wasn’t that there was a lot wrong with it so much as there wasn’t one thing right with it. The back deck? Being held up with car jacks. The basement? Filled with rat poison and evidence of rodents. The kitchen? Cockroach heaven. The foundation? Oh, the foundation. It turns out, the house, which we were told was built in the1950s, was actually a remodel of an earlier home built in the 19th century. Given its location, probably some sort of cabin, maybe just a few rooms, one story. When the 1950s owners built on, they added a second story, and built the house out in front, and added an attached garage on one side. But, and this is the crucial part – they didn’t extend the foundation of the home in any way. So basically, the front 10 feet of the house is unsupported in any way by foundation, and is sitting on sandy riverbank. And what was supported by foundation was actually being supported mostly by the 19th century foundation, which wasn’t meant to hold up a second story, since it was built to hold up a little shack.

It is probably bad news when you walk in the door and realize that the front 6 feet of your living room slope in an opposite direction as the back 14 feet, and that the clearly visible line of demarcation runs like a small mountain range from one side of the house to the other. Like a badly iced cake, the second story was slowly sliding off of the first floor, and the first floor of the building was slowly breaking in two, each half going in a different direction.

So, we cancelled the deal. Fixer upper, we wanted, but this was a tear-down. We went back to the seller with our inspection results, but they held firm on their price, and we walked away.

At this point, I was mentally done. We had seen nearly 30 homes, scattered across 5 different towns, each filthier and more structurally unsound than the last. We had waded through other people’s filth, smelled things that made me wish I had a portable gas mask, seen things in the privacy of other people’s homes that we wished we could unsee [ed. note: don't keep your fetish porn on a shelf in your kitchen pantry if you mean for that fetish to remain a secret]. We were demoralized, and a little broken by the process, and frustrated that we were going to be stuck in our apartment forever.

First of all, I swear and promise to have content tomorrow that isn’t real estate focused. It is just that the process of buying a house was so stressful that I have a lot of feels about it, and isn’t that what having a blog is all about?

So, we didn’t buy the farmhouse. But not buying that house got us more serious about looking, and coupling my long-time insomnia with my OCD-like obsession with local real estate listings, off we went with our long-suffering Realtor to view more houses. She took our requests to live on or near water very seriously, which is how, a week later, we regrouped in a delightful lake town about 90 minutes north of the city, at a house whose front porch afforded this view:

From the outside, the house was a little bit cookie-cutter, but the neighbourhood was full of adorable winterized cottages mixed with spectacular second-builds, and we were in love with the town, which is the kind of place in which you could run into the Sheriff, the guy who cuts your grass, and the wealthiest guy in town all sharing a booth at the local (non-Starbucks) coffee shop. I could see re-siding the house, taking its clapboard lines and re-doing it in white, with black shutters and robin’s egg blue front door. Silver doorhandle and knocker. I am good at seeing beyond what is there, to what could be.

Our realtor had a number of houses to show us that day, but this one, with this view, was the only one we cared about. But the longer we stood there, in the driveway, waiting for the listings agent, the more it seemed clear this wasn’t happening. “The owner is sick,” she said. “He won’t show the house today.” Even with my best ‘velvet over iron’ approach, “…he doesn’t have to leave the house. Maybe just sit at the kitchen table? We will be quick. Let him know we won’t judge the state of the house. We have ALL been sick. I don’t care if it is a mess,” he wouldn’t budge. Finally, we brought out the big guns. “We have guaranteed funding, and want to close ASAP.” But to no avail.

After that, nothing we saw got us going like the house on the lake that we couldn’t see. And nothing got me angrier than wasting a work day driving up there and back for nothing. But I guess the listing agent, desperate to sell this house, convinced the guy that we were serious, and got him out of the house for a second showing, a week later.

So off we drove, again, and this time, the listing agent called and told us she wouldn’t be there, but someone would be there to let us in the house. Foolish me, I assumed that meant her assistant, but in fact, it meant the 14 year old daughter, home on a school day (??), who let us in while we apologized, and then went and sat outside with her phone, texting furiously.

The thing about the internet and real estate is, if you are smart, you can find out everything about a house. We knew the sad story of this house: a wife who died in her late 30s, of cancer, a husband whose career was home renovation, and who probably got caught short in the real estate crisis. A home in pre-foreclosure. Two young teenagers, and a little girl in single digits. So, so heartbreaking. But not as heartbreaking as what we found in that house.

First, some judging. Well, to be honest, lots of judging. This house was the first we saw like this, but we saw plenty more: short sales and foreclosures, but filled with expensive toys. This one had full scuba gear for 4, a huge flatscreen in the den, flatscreens in every bedroom, Macbooks in two bedrooms, some authentic Louis Vuitton hanging in a closet, a late-model truck in the driveway, archery equipment, 2 ATVs parked in the garage, a boat tow in the back yard, etc. And I get that maybe it was all purchased when they were flush, but now they aren’t, and man, Craigslist that stuff before you lose your home. I saw that, and I kept seeing it as we house-hunted, and I got angry and angrier about it. All that conspicuous consumption, to look like a social class that doesn’t buy that crap anyway.

And the home. Oh, lord. There were two big dogs, in crates, in the dining room. Very sweet, and very big, and jammed into crates that were jammed into piles of half-filled boxes of … stuff. Random papers, dirty laundry, odd knicknacks. The house was not just messy, it was dirty. Filthy in a way that made it obvious that nobody cared to make it a home, and the amount of dishes in the kids’ rooms suggested they were eating on their beds every night, watching TV. There was no family dining table, or kitchen table, and when I realized that my Realtor had just stepped into a giant puddle of dog urine in the middle of the den, and hadn’t realized it yet, I discovered that even my obsessive reading of Emily Post’s Blue Book as a child hadn’t fully prepared me for remedying this situation gracefully.

It got worse. Worse than a giant puddle of dog urine, worse than a living room that looked like an episode of hoarders. Worse than the giant splashes of dog diarrhea that decorated the entire basement and the smell that ensued. It was the kids’ rooms. It wasn’t just the mess, or the dirt, that broke my heart. It was how obvious it was to me that these kids didn’t have a mother to love on them and that hometraining stopped, if it had ever started, with her passing. It was the displays. In the 14 year old’s room, empty bottles of Malibu Coconut Rum, the patron saint drink of underage girls, adorned the shelves, mixed in with cheerleading trophies and ribbons. And not just one bottle – lots of bottles. The son’s room, which was in the basement, past the dog excrement, was decorated in a style I think is called, “Early Michigan Militia.” Lots of empty alcohol bottles, shotgun shells, ninja-style weapons, and fake Nazi paraphernalia, a nice complement to the collection of Mammy and Moses collectibles we saw in the kitchen. A bit of a tell, really, about the family values, that collection.

There wasn’t enough Pine Sol in the world to clean this house of the dog poop, and not enough sage to get rid of the sadness. I know that kids get into all kinds of shenanigans, underage, but I don’t understand how a parent could let their underage kids display the results as trophies, as bragging rights to their alcohol consumption. These are not college freshmen, either – these are little kids, really. I left that house angry; angry at the man who put his grief first, maybe, and let his kids go unchecked, angry at the parent who kept his ATV but lost his house, who didn’t seem to see the anger emanating from the walls of his son’s bedroom, couldn’t see the dangers inherent in a little girl drinking underage, how vulnerable and exposed that could make her. I couldn’t imagine being in a position to lose my house, and making my little girl be the one to show it to strangers. I couldn’t imagine how you could live like that and ever open your front door to people. It was a complete absence of shame that floored me.

We didn’t buy this house, either, even though the location was amazing and price was excellent. I couldn’t live in that house without thinking of how bereft of adult responsibility it was, and I couldn’t stop the voice in my head from saying, on repeat, “Come ON, man – you HAVE KIDS. Get over yourself and step up your game, here.” I couldn’t make my family home rise from the detritus of this house.

This post could be subtitled, “Houses we did not buy”. Let me tell you about one of them.

House #1 We Did Not Buy: The Charming Farmhouse

As detailed here, the very first house we looked at was a charming farmhouse in a lovely lakeside town. Our checklist was pretty simple: we wanted a small town with city access over a true suburb, a fixer-upper instead of new construction, to err on affordability, and to consider this house a perch, a place to ride out the real estate crisis, and not the house we will be carried out of, feet-first.

The Farmhouse, at first glance, was all that. 100 years old, with a big formal dining room, a detached sun room, 3 little bedrooms upstairs and a den that would work as an office down. The kitchen was pure seventies awesome, and I mean that in the best way. Immaculate, but heavy on the avocado and harvest gold, a look I find a lot more charming than the cookie cutter kitchens I see in new construction. Not charming enough to keep, mind you, but there is something about estate sale houses where you can tell the decade that the owners just stopped updating and said to themselves, let’s just hold here. Or maybe it is the moment you can tell they realized that buying a fridge with a 25 year warranty just wasn’t necessary, for them.

This estate sale showing started well. You could tell the lady who owned the house was quite elderly when she passed, and tucked in random spots were school photos of young children and church notices. But like all old houses, there was some serious wonk. Like this:

Take it all in. This photo is, if anything, a toned down version of this wallpaper in real life.

What is that, you ask? Why, the wallpaper in the first floor bathroom. A bathroom that, I might add, had a door that opened directly off the dining room. I can’t even imagine. How does that even work? Say you have the whole family over for Christmas dinner, and as you sit around the dining room table, the twelve of you, someone excuses herself to ‘wash her hands’ and steps through the door of the powder room, where every single thing that might happen behind that closed door is fully audible to the guests on the other side? Do you leave the door open, so that your guests can admire your throne room?

You know you were thinking it.

Fixable, I know. Fixable. But off-putting.

But if the downstairs bathroom situation was odd, the upstairs was heartbreaking. The master bedroom looked like a lady had just stepped out of it for the day. Threadbare chenille bedspread on a carefully made bed, and a well-worn leatherette bible on the side table. A lady’s church suit and matching hat hung on the hook behind the door, and on the dressing table, half a bottle of her perfume, and a little dish holding her hair pins. And on the dresser, an antique teacup filled with clip on earrings – pearl clusters, a few paste diamond clusters. The saucer of the teacup had a short string of exceptional pearls wound around in it, their sheen hiding under a light layer of dust.

The realtor told us the heirs had been through, and taken what they wanted, and everything valuable, but looking at what they left behind made me question what they valued. Her pearls. Her well-read bible. Her wedding dress, which was just hanging from a hook in the attic, swaying with the air currents that eddied up and out the half-open attic window.

We didn’t buy the house, for lots of good practical reasons. Most of the problems were fixable – the dining room’s bathroom could have had its door relocated to open into the den, for example, which would have been perfect. The landscaping could be repaired, the sunroom torn down. But the house didn’t feel right.. It felt unsettled, and a little sad. It felt like the family was going to leave that wedding dress behind for us to deal with. It felt like all the Pine Sol in the world wouldn’t cover the smell of loose face powder and pink-bar Camay in the upstairs bathroom.

Friends, we bought a house. But before we bought a house, we looked at houses. And to better understand the horror of house hunting in this economic climate, some back story is in order.

When the mister and I first married, we lived in his charming, vintage condo in the city. By charming, I mean ‘charming’, what with the one little bathroom, and the tiny kitchen, but it also had a huge, formal dining room, exposed brick, a lovely curved wall of windows in the living room, and a pantry as large as the kitchen itself. It was a compromise, but a balanced one. And so we settled in there, made a life there, and were happy, but we outgrew it as a couple, and needed to move. That was in 2004/5.

The first time we put it on the market and started scouting for a bigger house in the suburbs, one of my inlaws was diagnosed with cancer. Since they lived 20 minutes from us in the city, it seemed an inopportune time to move an hour away. We stopped looking, and stayed.

The second time we put it on the market, 18 months later, we found an expansive vintage bungalow in a town far from the city but with easy train access to downtown. Unfortunately, our realtor turned out to be crazypants, and after she talked our buyers out of buying our apartment (during their inspection, no less), we were unable to make an offer on the house, and we fired her. Then, we were so demoralized by the experience that we stayed put awhile longer.

Then the market started to tank, and home ownership started to falter, and we saw that as a sign that we should jump back in and buy a house. I am addicted to real estate, and the internet is my inabler, and I found a sweet little red brick bungalow in a town by the lake, a town my husband has always wanted to live in, and it was priced to sell as a short sale. This was right at the start of the foreclosure crisis, and short sales were very uncommon.

People, we inspected, we offered, we wrote an earnest money cheque, and then … nothing. We waited for months, as closing date after closing date came and went, until finally we gave up. The bank was so swamped with preforeclosure mortgage failures that they didn’t have the time to close this house with us, and we ended up having to walk away. We gave up.

Then, in 2008, we found out we were going to be parents …. of twins! Cue the house hunt. But just as we started gearing up to look seriously, my downstairs neighbour, in a fit of pique that he was not being viewed by all as the center of the universe, set fire to our building as a way of attracting a little attention to himself. No, really. It wasn’t even an insurance fire, as it turns out he had no insurance. Just a little ‘pay attention to me’ that cost us a fortune and amped our general anxiety levels up permanently to alert, and more importantly, meant we couldn’t sell our place and move, because googling our address brought up the fire. You know what prospective buyers don’t like? Fire.

But I never stopped looking at real estate, and I spent hours on Redfin, and I started seeing houses in towns we loved but could not afford suddenly pop up as affordable, mostly estate sales and foreclosures. And one day, I saw this in my MLS feed, and I was hooked.

It all started with this.

A beautiful old farmhouse, with all of the original wood trim. That is handcarved, a little piece between the living and dining room, and there was just so much of it, in every room. And yes, it was an estate sale, and yes, the detached sunporch was filled with bees, and yes, the basement was too low to ever be finished, and yes, it had flaws, but I had high hopes for this little farmhouse, and what I could do with it.